The full-page ads in The Washington Post seem so
reasonable. The military contractor Pratt & Whitney has been
arguing that America doesn't need to spend $485 million to develop a
second engine for the F-35 jet fighter. It's a compelling argument.
We're in a serious economic crisis, so why on earth would we build
another jet engine when the first one is sufficient?

Pratt & Whitney has supporters in high places. Pentagon Chief
Robert Gates doesn't want the second engine, which would be built by
General Electric and Rolls Royce, and neither does his Air Force.
President Obama, too, has come out against the unnecessary spending.

Pratt & Whitney isn't spending hundreds of thousands of
advertising dollars simply out of a spirit of fiscal rectitude. They're
the builders of the original F-35 engine, and they don't want the
competition muscling into their territory. Still, the F-35 Joint Strike
Fighter is already a terrible boondoggle — Lockheed Martin recently
confessed that the per-plane cost has
nearly doubled since the initial estimate — so adding a second
engine would be nonsense on stilts.

Yes, you read that correctly. The president and the Air Force don't
want the bloody thing. But Congress, which treats every weapon system
like an endangered species, insists on keeping this vestigial program
alive. The engine represents jobs, and U.S. politicians have a
difficult time of saying no to jobs at the moment. Even Barney Frank
(D-MA), who has taken the most courageous stand against military
spending by calling for a 25 percent reduction in the Pentagon budget, voted
in favor of the back-up engine because it meant jobs at the GE
plant in his state.

If GE and Rolls Royce proposed to paint the F-35 pink with green
polka dots, Congress would probably stand up and cheer the effort, as
long as the initiative promised to employ enough people.

This engine vote comes at a particularly sad time. This Memorial Day
weekend, the United States officially passed the
trillion-dollar mark in spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We exceeded
the cost of the Vietnam War several years ago, and now we're heading
for the record of most expensive conflict of all time.

The trillion-dollar war bill and the half-billion-dollar engine are
connected in a way that goes beyond their status as budget items.